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Microsoft's Black Thursday: XBox Live goes down as XBox Studio canned

Just as 18,000 staff told they face pink slips

Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming service fell offline this afternoon, San Francisco time, and remained down for at least a couple of hours.

The US giant reported that access to its Xbox Live Core Services and TV, Music and Video services were "limited".

"We understand that some of our members are running into issues when attempting to sign in to Xbox Live, and we'd like you to know that we’re doing all that we can to correct this issue," Microsoft told frustrated players on the XBox Live status page.

"Thanks for your patience while we work."

At the time of writing, Microsoft's Azure cloud, on which XBox Live is based, was not reporting any problems, suggesting that the problems lie with the service's sign-on and authentication elements rather than basic compute and storage.

Having Xbox Live connectivity issues on the Xbox One? The proper teams are on it! More updates being posted here: http://t.co/99xfLNeme4 ^AC